Back in the United States, he raised $16,600 on Kickstarter to make www.ARGzombies.com a reality.

On that shoestring budget, he turned to Elance, an online global marketplace for freelancers who work remotely. He hired Romanian programmers for $12 an hour; a Filipino artist for $10 to $16 an hour; two U.S. Web developers for $16 to $20 an hour and a U.S. musician for $15 an hour. He now hopes to have the game live by year-end.

At one point, when Morris ran out of money and moved back in with his mom in Dayton, Ohio, he offered up his own services as a video producer on Elance, bringing in $20 an hour, and eventually finding a full-time job with an Elance client.

For Morris, the marketplace was a boon on both sides of the hiring equation.

"As a smaller company, it helped me level the playing field to get access to talent," he said. As a freelancer himself, "it is a way to get paid to do what you love."

But his story also illustrates how such marketplaces drive down wages, as their worldwide reach means that U.S. freelancers compete against cheaper overseas workers.

Elance, oDesk merger

Elance of Mountain View recently finalized a merger with its chief rival oDesk, located down the road in Redwood City, and released a report on the combined company, which connects workers and companies in 180 countries.

"We're building a workplace for the world," said Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance-oDesk. "People can get hired, collaborate and get paid on our platform."

The merged platform expects to have $930 million in annual freelancer billings this year. A quarter of its 8 million freelancers are based in the U.S. Their annual earnings come to $179.8 million a year, or 19 percent of the worldwide total. U.S. freelancers on the platform average $23.85 an hour.

Elance-oDesk focuses on "knowledge workers." Technology jobs account for the majority of work, followed by admin support, and writing and translation.

The companies doing the hiring mirror the distribution of U.S. business. Small businesses account for 70 percent of its hiring. Companies with 100 to 1,000 employees are 20 percent of the market and large enterprises are 10 percent. NBC, Walt Disney, Microsoft and Cisco are among the big companies that use the platform.

Elance-oDesk adds about 10 percent to freelancers' charges as its commission.

With 240 employees, the company also hires 500 freelancers - through its platform, of course.

Independent workers are the fastest-growing segment of the workforce, Rosati said. About a third of the U.S. workforce now is outside the traditional 9 to 5 jobs; that number could reach 50 percent in a decade, he said.

Elance-oDesk "is filling a gap in our economy that in principle benefits all participants," said Stowe Boyd, research lead on the future of work and work technologies at analysis firm GigaOm Research. ODesk was a client of his firm's reports.

But he had a big "however" to add.

"The hitch in that shiny, gleaming 'isn't it wonderful?' picture is the economic arbitrage of outsourcing work from the United States to cheaper labor in places like the Philippines, and the economic impact on the American workforce," Boyd said. "That impact is largely a negative, although there are counter-arguments that the American business couldn't exist without outsourcing some of its operations, so however many U.S. jobs it has would otherwise be lost."

Freelancers set rates

Rosati countered that the company helps freelancers in multiple ways.

"It's a platform where freelancers can find work, build a reputation, learn new skills, work as long and as much as you want to," he said. He said that freelancers can set their own rates so they can "focus on controlling their destiny and income streams, as opposed to being constrained by local markets and economies."

Morris had some more on-the-ground insights on the pitfalls and benefits of hiring far-flung contingent workers.

"It works really well for one-off projects for artists or musicians," he said. "You get an estimate upfront, guide them through it, ask for revisions, and it's thank you, bye."

By contrast, trying to manage a remote team didn't work well.

"It's pretty darn easy to find people, but it's hard to find ones who will stick around and understand your project," he said. His $12-per-hour Romanian programming team fell apart as the lead programmer was a poor manager. Now he's working with a recent programming grad in the East Bay who makes $16/hour. "He speaks English, and I can take BART over there."

Freelance skills: What's hot or not?

Elance-oDesk's report on its $930 million a year marketplace for freelance workers shows what skills employers are increasingly seeking and which are less requested.

Worldwide skills with growing demand

Worldwide skills with decreasing demand

Customer support

Business card design

Social media optimization

Facebook development

Mobile advertising

Search engine marketing

3-D modeling & animation

Banner ad design

Data science

Infographics

U.S. top skills

Skills with highest U.S. demand

Hot skills with growing demand

PHP

AngularJS programming

HTML

Woocommerce

Wordpress

HTML5

MySQL

Internet security

JavaScript

Data science

Where the work is

These are the top categories of work worldwide on Elance-oDesk based on billings from January to May.